What is a Citizen Developer and Shadow IT?

A “Citizen Developer” is a user who creates business applications for a department or company and who is not part of the IT department.

“Shadow IT” typically refers to users or departments who have implemented software or other technical solutions outside of IT’s approval or knowledge.

Citizen Developers and Shadow IT can be a real headache for an already overworked and underfunded IT department. Users don’t have to know much technically, if anything, to assemble useful business applications using No-code/Low-code platforms.

Microsoft Integration

Use Cases and Application Gallery

In-house built applications specific to each organization is the cornerstone of what gives them a competitive edge for selling better, building better products and services, improving customer service, and saving time and money.

Any mid-sized organization can require literally hundreds of applications to automate the sheer number of processes they have in different areas of the business. Here are a number of applications to give you some ideas around what applications could work for you.

Partner Program

DOCOVA’s Partner Program offers your company a competitive advantage that can open the door to new business opportunities and revenue streams. Our Partner Program provides access to DOCOVA, lead generation, product and marketing training, discounts, a technical support portal and access to beta versions.

12 Apps in 18 Days – A Notes Migration Project

12 Apps in 18 Days – A Notes Migration Project

Jamesway Incubator, located in Cambridge Ontario, manufactures and sells incubators worldwide. For years they have used IBM Notes and Domino collaboration products to automate business processes and share information with a staff located all over the world. However, like many in the Notes and Domino community, a corporate decision was recently made to switch to Microsoft based technologies.

Replacing Notes based email is relatively easy, since the migration tools and processes are well defined. Migrating Notes based applications is much more difficult. Fortunately, Jamesway implemented DOCOVA as a document management system almost a decade ago to manage corporate documents, and the new version of DOCOVA (V5), has been specifically designed to migrate Notes based applications to SQL. DOCOVA V5 understands the design elements that were unique to Notes, and knows how to handle them when moving to SQL based technologies.

Jamesway contracted DLI to perform the Notes application migration. DOCOVA App Importer did the heavy lifting by automatically migrating the application design from Lotus Domino to DOCOVA, leaving the developer free to adjust and tweak the migrated applications. Without App Importer to take care of the grunt work it would have taken 6 months instead of 3 weeks to transform these applications.

The DOCOVA migration methodology (Analyze, Plan, Migrate, Manage) has guided this project. The initial analysis provided us with key information so that we could provide a quote for the migration and identify resource requirements. In discussions with Jamesway, the migration plan was developed, which in this case was to migrate off the Notes client first, keeping the Domino backend, then move the migrated applications and existing Document Management system to the DOCOVA SQL platform. Since the DOCOVA UI is the same regardless of the backend platform, Jamesway could spread the migration out over time to be better able to handle the resource requirements on their end.

The applications migrated included maintenance management, requisition systems (purchase order, cheque, etc), as well as reference/document repository applications. Utilizing App Importer, the developer doing the migration didn’t need to know what the application did or the business logic behind it, as it was all migrated intact.

All aspects of the design were migrated (Layouts, Pages, Views, Calendar Views, Forms, Subforms, Agents, Script Libraries, Images, Folders) as well as the data, including profile documents. What about security? Yes, that was migrated too, including document level security (authors/readers/controlled access sections). As for the LotusScript, that was automatically translated to Javascript.

Being an early release of DOCOVA V5 there were hurdles to be crossed and issues to be addressed. In some cases application logic just doesn’t flow the same way in a browser as it does in a local Notes client (eg. dialogs, prompt boxes, etc), requiring some adjustments/tweaking by the developer post migration. Luckily the DOCOVA Application Analysis process flags these cases for us. We are also constantly improving App Importer to address new scenarios, which means that if we were to repeat the project with the current version of DOCOVA V5, it could be completed in even less time.

The Jamesway project has now moved into UAT. After we showed IT management the migrated applications and they saw how the business logic and UI have been maintained, they were quite comfortable taking on the UAT step, since there is little to no training required. Users just need to be shown how to access the new platform and add their applications to the workspace.

While we still have some work to do to complete the migration to the SQL platform, we’ve been able to take what could have been a very costly re-development project and deliver results in a short period of time, at a reasonable cost.